If anyone believes offshore outsourcing jobs is passé and not impacting U.S. labor markets think again. The Economic Policy Institute has published a new study showing America has lost millions of jobs to China's cheap labor market. From 2001 to 2013, the massive trade deficit with China has cost the United States 3.2 million jobs.

On Manufacturing and Innovation

Manufacturing was once widely recognized as the outstanding strength of America and the basis of its prosperity, but manufacturing also has a more recent history of being almost a pariah. This newer view equated computer chips with potato chips, asserted that manufacturing is better left to others, and suggested that the nation is actually fortunate to be losing manufacturing and aiming to replace it with design, research, and services.

Congress is focused on all the wrong things to get people back to work. We hear day after day the drone of budget deficits, yet not a word is mentioned on the trade deficit. This is the problem Congress should be obsessed with. Our massive trade deficit is stunting economic growth and costing America millions of jobs.

So says the Economic Policy Institute in an updated study. Over the last decade, from 2001 to 2011, the United States has lost a whopping 2.7 million jobs to China alone and this estimate is conservative. The China PNTR trade agreement was signed by President Clinton on October 10th, 2000 and China entered the WTO in 2001.

The more than 2.7 million jobs lost or displaced in all sectors include 662,100 jobs from 2008 to 2011 alone—even though imports from China and the rest of the world plunged in 2009.

Below is EPI's map showing China unfair trade's job losses as a percentage of total state employment. These are not just a few minor localized pockets of jobs. We're talking significant payroll percentages per state being lost just due to China trade.

People talk a great deal about free trade. But for better or for worse the real world that we live in is more a mercantilist world than it is a free markets and free trade world. And in this mercantilist world there is a fundamental divergence between the goal of our corporations, which is to maximize profit, and the goal of rebuilding manufacturing here in the United States.

For untold millions, Walmart is not simply a place to shop, but the place. Considering that the quintessential big-box retailer claims to, and often does, offer just about every conventional item necessary for the family at an affordable price, this should be none too surprising.

However, at what cost does this convenience come, and in the grander scheme of things, is what Walmart has to offer really convenience at all? The company’s ownership would most definitely say so, as would throngs of eager consumers. Many economists, social scientists, and former employees, though, have a strikingly different opinion. While one can choose to believe whichever side of the argument he or she likes best, where do the facts lie?

First and foremost, it should be known that every single American taxpayer is essentially footing the bill for Walmart’s mere existence.

According to Reuters, this is because, as a study published last year by the City University of New York’s Hunter College Center for Community Planning showed, company employees receive inadequate health insurance coverage and in turn are left with few other options than to apply for public assistance. Beyond providing a lack of medical benefits, Walmart’s presence in most regions, says the study, "Depresses area wages....pushes out more retail jobs than it creates, and results in more retail vacancies."

Howz that globalization workin' out fer ya? A new National Science Board report, Science and Engineering Indicators 2012, finally shows some bleak statistics for American Scientists and Engineers. High-technology manufacturing has lost 28% of jobs since a 2000 employment high of 2.5 million. That's 687,000 jobs. Below is the NSB report graph of the drop in high-tech manufacturing employment for the last decade.

U.S. employment in high-technology manufacturing reached a peak in 2000, with 2.5 million jobs. The recession of 2001 provided the first big hit causing “substantial and permanent” job losses, the report said. By the end of the decade, more than a quarter of the jobs were gone.

NSB committee chair Dr. José-Marie Griffiths:

We’re seeing the result in the very real, and substantial, loss of good jobs